


Untethered

by i_gaze_at_scully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Post-Episode: s07e07 Orison, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:55:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21537064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_gaze_at_scully/pseuds/i_gaze_at_scully
Summary: Scully's self-preservation after Orison
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	Untethered

It is too loud and too quiet all at once. She hears every sound like a pin prick: the shutter of the crime scene photographer’s camera, the scribbling of notes on worn pockets pads, the pitying sucking of teeth and clicking of tongues. Low whistles and professionally obscured coughs. **  
**

She thinks she hears a faucet dripping somewhere.

But it’s too quiet, like that liminal space after a storm before the birds start singing again, before nature is unpaused. It is unnatural. The murmurs of officers, the shuffling of feet, it all drones low, hazy, persistent and disruptive to her frequency. It resonates somewhere beyond the pin pricks, so that the rest of the noise is swallowed whole.

She thinks she feels her heartbeat in her ears. 

Nothing smells right. Her home doesn’t have a smell, not to her. Sometimes, for only a moment, when she opens the door after a long trip, she catches what other people must smell when they enter her home. She could never begin to name it, no hints of this or that, but it is distinct. It is hers. Now her home reeks of blood (her blood. _His_ blood). It is drenched in fear, cold sweat, mortal dread. 

The faucet drips again, cuts through the resonant static.

Tea. She wants tea. Piping hot, her fingers curled around the mug, her terrycloth robe soft against her skin. Clean, smooth skin after a bubble––

No. No, she won’t ever take another bubble bath. 

_Someone needs to fix that_ fucking _faucet._

This is her _home_. Her space. It is where she breaks her bread, where she lays her head to sleep 

_If I should die before I wake…_

If only she could curl up under the covers. Pile them high, pull every blanket she has around the house and bury herself beneath them in her bed. 

But her bed is not an option. Her bedroom is a crime scene. She almost died in her bedroom, she has killed in her bedroom, she walked over broken glass as the shards dug into her screaming skin to save her own life in her _goddamn bedroom._

The world is burning and before she realizes it, she in standing in front of the wicker ottoman in her alcove. Where she keeps those blankets, the ones she’d pile high, the ones she’d bury herself in in the comfort and safety of a bed that doesn’t exist anymore. 

She opens the ottoman, marvels for the first time at the ribbon holding the lid on; soft and pretty, taut and strong. She unfolds the first blanket she sees and wraps it around her shoulders.

It smells like her, like her home, like her world is not burning.

Numb and straining with effort, she crosses the threshold of an unfamiliar terrain shrouded in a precious piece of home.


End file.
